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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25701637">as the fire's burning low, i can see it in your eyes,</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/booleanWildcard/pseuds/booleanWildcard'>booleanWildcard</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Naruto</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Angst, Body Horror, Character Study, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Domesticity, Kakashi is NOT okay, M/M, Masochism, NON-LINEAR story, PTSD, Pining, References to suicidal ideation, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Transmasculine Character, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Violence, Werewolves, canonical mentions of suicide, ego-death, enjoyment of violence, gothic-horror style werewolves, kakashi needs all of the therapy, medic! iruka, mostly angst by volume, no canon here, other were-animals too, self-betaed, some caretaking, transfeminine character, unhealthy everything, unhealthy worldview</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 08:33:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>11,379</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25701637</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/booleanWildcard/pseuds/booleanWildcard</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>...the simplicity is a deeper thing, fundamental to his being, and that he is monstrous is both its product and its producer: he is wolf, he is beast kin, he is wardog, he is monster, and as such he is bound to Konoha in blood, through familial tradition and magic and unshakeable loyalty.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>as the fire's burning low, i can see it in your eyes,</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Very very seriously, please read the tags. Please do not read this story if you're in a bad place. Please note that this story <b>does mention suicidal and suicide ideation</b>, in ways that may ring true or be triggering for people who similarly experience it. Please be generous with yourself, and exercise appropriate caution.</p><p>This also graphically describes trauma, including some inherited trauma. It's Heavy. Seriously, please exercise caution. </p><p>Two of the characters are trans. There is explicit sex featuring the trans characters. If you would like to know ahead of time which characters those are or what terms I use to describe their bodies, I have included those notes in the end tags. </p><p>There iiiis some stuff that might read as a specific trope-bashing, but that is very very much not my intended goal here-- there will be those details in my bottom note. </p><p>This is AU; i did not hold myself particularly loyal to any part of canon. Similarly, the characters derive from this world and have been molded by it, so they may not conform to canonical or pre-existing perceptions of how they ought to act. </p><p>My normal notes apply-<br/>1) I Write for my own edification. Do not come to me expecting something good, or really with any expectations at all, and you may not be disappointed; I'm chasing a different thing here.<br/>2) I own nothing and nothing in this fic is original; if any of it resonates with you, please feel free to take any of it and run with it yourself.<br/>3) I stand on the shoulders of giants, and follow in their footsteps, by which i mean generations of fans who wrote before me. I am indebted to their work, which has kept me warm through some dark times, and offer my work in homage to the tradition.<br/>4) I am deeply anxious and terrified of people, and as such i tend not to respond to comments very quickly, if at all. I do read them, so if you leave one, please know that I am grateful for your readership.  (also please note that the "if" there is legitimately an if-- given my own terror at interaction, i definitely understand if people would rather lurk and read, as that has been my own mode for nearly 20 years of fan-engagement.</p><p>Also, special thanks to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/menecio/pseuds/menecio">Menecio</a>, who gave this a pre-read and boosted my confidence enough to post it. They are, btw, an absolutely fabulous lovely creature in addition to being my bravery buddy for this fic (and also they write beautifully if ur looking for stuff to read hint hint) &lt;3</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>See, the thing about Kakashi’s life is that it’s <em> simple, </em>and that’s the way he likes it.</p><p>It’s not necessarily the routine-- though there certainly <em> is </em> that, both the unremarkable slog of banal tasks required for daily existence, and the sorts of things he can expect to encounter in pursuit of his Duty--  nor is it the nature of the missions he takes, which are usually both quite complex and <em> extremely </em> violent; nor is it even the reliable predictability with which both shinobi and civilians alike regard him with equal parts fear and revulsion, this often the only source of stability with which he can ground himself.</p><p>No, the <em> simplicity </em> is a deeper thing, fundamental to his being, and that he is monstrous is both its product and its producer: he is wolf, he is beast kin, he is wardog, he is <em> monster </em> , and as such he is bound to Konoha in blood, through familial tradition and magic and unshakeable loyalty. He has one function, and that is Service; he has one role, and that is Protector; he has no worth or reason, outside of these things. This is how it has been always been for him-- for them-- for his family and his kind, his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father, and he expects nothing else-- he was born for this, <em> bred </em> for this (literally <em> bred </em>for it, deliberately, as closely as all of Konoha’s great families, shinobi and beast alike). </p><p>Life is simple: There are stares. There is avoidance.  There is his apartment, cold and lifeless like a cage. There are missions. There is traveling. There is open forest,  the smell of pine trees,  the texture of soft earth beneath his feet and sandals. There is running beneath the stars with the wind in his fur, lips a twisted snarl of feral joy because he is <em> still alive, </em>fresh from another fight and another victory. There is the pain in his stolen eye, persistent and glowering and implacable. There is violence, the exchange of blows, the heartbeat fast strategizing of the battlefield game, whose consequences are deadly and immediate and absolute. There is the unctuous saltiness of blood flooding his mouth, the slight grinding resistance of flesh and bone twisting under the compression of clawed hands, the wet slide of sharp teeth forcing their way through layers of soft fat and dense muscle.</p><p>This is all he knows, all he has ever known, and thus he has nothing else to ache for or dream about or mourn.</p><p>Kakashi does what he can to keep things this way.( ; to do otherwise would be untenable).</p><p>--</p><p>It is easier said than done.</p><p>These things- these <em> truths </em> -- they are mantras that Kakashi repeats to himself ad infinitum, inviolable dicta passed onto him by his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father, a tradition he’s inherited alongside the contract with Konoha and the the binding magic therein. Duty, Function, Role, Service, Protector, Defende <em> r, Wardog </em> ; he carries these words in his head and his heart, a litany as persistent and loud as is required to drown out whatever else might otherwise worm its way into the shameful recesses of his mind. And they <em> are </em> loud-- he <em> makes </em> them loud-- when he feels the piercing gaze of strangers tracking his movements, the uncomfortable prickle that means someone knows where he is, someone’s <em> noticed </em> him, <em> seen </em> him, <em> marked </em> his presence with fear or revulsion or both, marked his presence at all.</p><p>Kakashi remembers Sakumo-- remembers that he called the man Sakumo, the trappings of childhood a luxury for gentler beings. In his memories, Sakumo is an imposing figure still: a noble silhouette of a man, broad and strong and impossibly tall in the way of a warrior to the child still clinging to his legs. It was Sakumo who told him what they were-- what that <em> meant-- </em> who taught him the litany, who helped him through that terrifyingly convulsive night when the wolf first rode his body. It was Sakumo who confirmed that they weren’t the same as the others-- not the civilians or the shinobi or even many of the other noble families--that they were alien here, would always be alien here, and that what happiness was possible for them had thus to be found elsewhere, in service and service alone-- not in idyllic dreams of family and peace, but in <em> that simplicity. </em></p><p>It was Sakumo that had made it look <em> so easy, </em>nearly automatic, to live under these harsh strictures. Unwavering, he had gone on mission after mission, had returned alive and with grisly wounds to wear proudly as scars of office, had borne the weight of his alienness as if it were lighter than a feather or the falling leaves for which Konoha was named. Nothing had fazed him, nothing had touched him, nothing had ever betrayed in him a hint of doubt, nothing had been able to take him down.</p><p>Nothing except his own swords.</p><p>It is only while looking at the ruin of his father-- his indelible, relentless, untouchable father, brought low by an inability to live up to the dispassionate requirements of impossible ideals, by his failure to keep everything <em> simple, </em>and thus punished and destroyed by his own hands-- that the truth of what Kakashi has been born into becomes real to him. He is six, a child by any standards but those that he knows, and he understands then that this will be him too someday: that this trajectory has a gravity stronger than either of them, and that his end of his has already been written, as dark and lonely and grisly as this. Everything else is getting there.</p><p>And this, too, is part of the understanding. Part of what it means to be a wardog.</p><p><em> This </em> is why it’s simple. (and for once, no part of him rebels.)</p><p>(He knows where he keeps his father’s swords.)</p><p>--</p><p>The transformation is exquisite in its painfulness.</p><p>This, too, is something Kakashi can use. Pain is a given, a constant; the only thing he really knows how to do is hurt (he does it very well), and one of Sakumo’s lessons was how to use that pain, how to make it a weapon and feed it into his strength, if only temporarily and at great cost.</p><p>(This lesson is one of many experiences that render him monstrous to those on the outside, who are not wardog and who do not understand. They think it cruel, a tactic to create a child soldier, to strip him of what little humanity that he--something ostensibly subhuman in their eyes-- might otherwise have-- they do not realize that it was a <em>kindness</em>, a generosity, one of only ways Sakumo could show his son that there was love between them. The skill is brutal and damaging, but less so than any of the alternatives, the only way to process <em>being</em> in a world so hostile to one’s basic existence that one’s complete eradication is the only inevitable outcome. Those that look to his training and lament the loss of Kakashi’s potential future don’t realize that there was no potential future<em>, </em>that there never had been. This way, with this strategy-- poisoned water though it was-- he might, at least, extend what time he had, do some good while he had it, because that was the realistic scope of his horizons and they had both known it.</p><p>It was a <em> Kindness. </em>)</p><p>And <em> fuck </em> but it <em> is </em> agonizing: he forces his breathing to slow as he feels the change break onto him, pulling himself into his body, half-dropping the lids of his eyes. There is a rhythm to cycling pain; he inhales as the bones start to grow beneath his flesh, building onto themselves as they lengthen and gain mass, expanding faster than the flesh around than comfortably accommodate. Skin and muscle can barely compensate-- their growth is a desperate race to match the speed of the transformation, with as much burn (and that much more for the stretch) of the bone beneath them, right at the edge of splitting. Kakashi arches his back, instinctively fighting the way his spine twists beneath the skin, writhing like a living thing, ribs crackling as they force themselves outwards in the shape of a canine barrel, making room for the expanded lungs and an extra heart. He is bigger in this body, literally, and maintaining balance during the shift is difficult; he falls forward, catching himself on an a hand now huge and jagged and tipped with wicked claws, while the joins in his leg radically shift positions and a tail erupts from the base of his spine. The push of fur through human-soft skin is comparatively minor: just the prickle of needles that erupts across his contorting body, a biting drag that draws his feverish attention behind it. Most acute are the changes to his face and neck:  long with practice, he opens his mouth-- the first blood he tastes is always his own, running across sharpening teeth as his gums split to accommodate both the teeth and the lengthening of his sinuses and jaws into a snout; his neck, meanwhile, is growing a second larynx, and for a moment the extra flesh constructs his breathing; he pushes back the fear at the sensation of choking, because <em> he welcomes this. </em> The wolf’s senses are better than his own, all but the eyes, and so he is buffeted by stimuli when his newly canid ears and nose reconnect themselves to his brain, a disorienting wave of sensation that offers him absolutely no time to recover.</p><p>But Kakashi <em> welcomes this, </em> he <em> lives for this </em> , has come to think of these sensations as a kind of ally: this shift, this transition, this pain-- this <em> is </em> simple, the only time that “simple” is easy, when it invades and rearranges his body and leaves him disoriented and panting and <em> so so much bigger than he is, </em> than even this body, than any physical limitations. He is not Kakashi now, and he is not <em> wolf </em> now, he only <em> is, </em>a thing that needs no name, a thing infinite and tenacious, a thing hungry to wreak its vengeance on a vituperative world by means of his continued obdurate existence.</p><p>And, of course, with teeth.</p><p>What-was-once-Kakashi rears back, disconcertingly bipedal as he balances on clawed toes, and inhales deeply the blood-pain-fear scent of his own transformation, drawing back his lips in challenge. He barely has the patience to wait for a signal from his team leader; when it comes, he gathers the mantle of all his pain and anger and fear and rage around him, the stares and the loneliness and the memories, wraps them over his shoulders him like a cloak, and takes to the field.</p><p>(‘Most of these are children’, he refuses to think, as his teeth begin to find their targets and his tongue bursts with the sharp flavor of blood that is not his own; he is wardog, and so he knows better than most there are no children on a shinobi’s field of war, even if his kills begin to look younger and younger with each passing year.)</p><p>--</p><p>Joining Root had been a mistake.</p><p>The thought had been present in the back of his mind at the time, but Kakashi had ignored it, told himself that the misgivings were a relic of the too-sensitive child he’d starved out of himself years ago. He’d been fresh from the war, so tired despite his relative youth, and he hadn’t trusted the powers that be, when they’d looked at all the destruction accrued by both city and people, and decided that it was to mourn and rebuild-- to exercise mercy-- as if the danger and the need for vigilance was over. Still jumpy with fear and adrenaline, reacting according to the needs of battles months prior and too young to realize how little they knew of their own damage, he and his fellow Root initiates had heard Danzo promising <em> “simple” </em> in tones whose sharp edges they recognized, and so they’d taken everything he offered.</p><p>He knows, when he joins, that Root will probably be what kills him, and he accepts that, just as he accepted the same likely cost to his inherited contract with Konoha-- at that time, to the best of his figuring, the costs <em> were </em> the same, because this <em> was </em> an action he’d taken <em> for Konoha. I </em>t’s just that he’d expected to die on a battlefield, or else under the same circumstances as his father.</p><p>Instead, Danzo calls him down to a meeting on an innocuous Thursday, as opaque and machiavellian as the man ever is. Root is an old, shadowy organization, built in the image of older, shadowier organizations; Kakashi hadn’t known what that meant, initially, but it’s become bitterly obvious the longer he’s spent in its system, and now he can no longer silence the doubts that are starting to intrude on the carefully maintained structures of his internal world. None of Root shinobi knows everything that the organization does-- or even a fraction of it-- and none of them knows what any of the others are doing; Kakashi is thus unsurprised to hear that <em> an eye </em> has been recovered from a downed Uchiha-- another clan of beasts-- and that they’re looking to try re-implanting the eye into another host-- shinobi, eventually, but it’s best to start with one of their own kind.</p><p>Technically, it’s an<em> offer. </em> Kakashi <em> can </em> ostensibly refuse-- but there are three things that Kakashi has come to know about Danzo: that he is more ruthless than any foe Kakashi has ever encountered on the battlefield, that he knows when the people around him are a threat to his leadership, and that they both know that Danzo’s been looking into the binding magic that govern the beast clans’ Contracts with Konoha. Kakashi doesn’t think Danzo could technically compel him through the <em> bind </em> to take the eye, but that research has certainly yielded other nasty details that might get other people bound to things far less tenable.</p><p>Reluctantly, he agrees to take the eye.</p><p>It does not go well.</p><p>The initial implantation isn’t <em> disastrous, </em> but while his body can heal itself from the grievous damage it does to itself through the process of transformation, this <em> badly </em> damages his chakra pathways and drains the depths of his reserves. While he, too, is beast as the Uchiha were, their kind are not all so similar as shinobi and civilians assume them to be, and so his body fights the new eye like it’s an enemy, rejecting the graft; the eye, in turn, reacts like a sapient thing, with Chakra reserves of its own and a will for battle. Infection sets in, and fever, and his prognosis does not look good.</p><p>He doesn’t remember much of this time. Just healers. Medics. He knows the feel of them, even when he’s not lucid or conscious, and hates them as he always has-- always so cold and invasive, their hands proprietary on his body; they prod him as if he can’t feel pain, their chakra uncomfortable and invasive as it penetrates his body through means of any injury they find, trying to force said body to repair itself in ways that feel violently unnatural.</p><p>Any warrior has given some thought to death, to how they want to die-- there is no such thing as “a  good death”, and certainly not for the wardogs, that’s not a lie they typically allow themselves to indulge for long-- but nevertheless, Kakashi hadn’t wanted to go like this. Not with someone else’s chakra inside his body, trying (and failing) to force it to accept a stolen graft he never wanted, and that doesn’t want him either.</p><p>(He isn’t often lucid enough to think,  but it does occur to him that, for all the careful awareness of where he kept his father’s swords, for as much as their quiet and persistent presence has been a grisly sort of balm, it is a bitter twist of irony that his trajectory has not been parallel with his father’s.)</p><p>--</p><p>Whatever else there is, it is not dark.</p><p>Pain is not dark. The fever is not dark. He doesn’t know what it is, but it is not dark.</p><p>He doesn’t know where he is, or what’s happening. He is only aware of his body insomuch that it appears to be a locus of pain, but otherwise it is without edges: infinite and incandescent in the worst possible way, and so <em>so fucking cold. </em>He thinks he sees people and things and places, conducts conversations, travels on rivers he does not know, but none of these are things that he can swear to, none of them are intelligible in the moment or thereafter-- there is too much pain, too much noise, too much of himself drawn into the battle between body and eye for there to be any room for things like cognizance or memory.</p><p>In the morass, he feels a tendril of warmth; he moves towards it, intuitively, even though it is chakra that isn’t his, invasive chakra, a <em> healer’s </em>chakra. In this moment, he is vulnerable and scared, operating automatically and without thinking, the way he thinks he’s trained himself to do when lucid; he moves towards it, seeking anything in which to ground himself.</p><p>And this healer Chakra is different(, which is about the limits of his ability to characterize anything in this state)-- gentle, generous, examining the lay of what there is to find instead of assuming it knows the shape of the damage already. The healing is still painful, still an act fundamentally of forcing his body to react in ways that it is not inclined toward, but the chakra lingers through that process, warm and steady, a companion through the excruciating work.</p><p>(There are a hundred reasons Kakashi can name for why he is drawn to the chakra, and many of them are impersonal-- but some are not, some are the things that he should not seek, not as a wardog. )</p><p>--</p><p>When Kakashi wakes for the first time in Iruka’s home, he is too tired to think much of anything, and so he lays there for a time, cataloguing the texture of the ceiling. It is neither the most pleasant of experiences nor as easy as it should be: one of his eyes, the new eye, the one that almost killed him, is swirling lazily as it siphons away a small stream of his Chakra, writing the details of Iruka’s ceiling to a newly eidetic memory. Both the eye and the entire side of his face into which it’s been implanted are throbbing with pain, but both this and the draw on his Chakra seem sustainable now: his body, exhausted and aching, is learning how to control that flow, to make enough Chakra to compensate for its constant draw, how not to let that draw start to pull from anything vital.</p><p>He doesn’t know Iruka’s name at the time, doesn’t know who brought him here or who the medic was-- only that this is neither the hospital nor Root’s private medical complex, and that he doesn’t want to think about what that probably means; in a rare instance of mercy towards himself, he allows himself to not: to simply absorb the energy around him, to rest and to receive.</p><p>The Medic has a nice house. Warm, lived in. It feels like the chakra that had been his companion throughout the healing process, the chakra he can still feel coursing through him and soothing the burn in the implantation wound. There is a second Chakra too-- huge, but nevertheless giving the impression of youth despite its discordant strength, energetic and boisterous and almost too much for Kakashi’s inflamed senses. The people who live in this house love each other, in a simple and familial way, and as a result the chakra imbued in the place reflects their comfort here, makes it welcoming even to a stranger.</p><p>Kakashi <em> does </em>recognize Iruka by appearance, when the man comes in to check on him-- brown hair and brown skin, scar, beautiful in that abstract way that some shinobi are (attractive and fierce, good to look at and perhaps imagine, but otherwise out of Kakashi’s reach and ultimately best kept at a distance.) Kakashi doesn’t know his name, but there are few in Konoha that don’t know Iruka’s face: he is ubiquitous at the Hokage tower, the scourge of many a Jounin at the mission desk, a skilled navigator of all things esoterically administrative-- and, of course, he is Sarutobi Hiruzen’s adopted son.</p><p>Sarutobi Hiruzen, the Hokage, the person against whom Kakashi has been subtly working while serving Root.</p><p>“You’re the medic?” Kakashi asks; he has to try twice, because his voice is hoarse and croaky from disuse, and its first attempt to find words ends in a false start.</p><p>Iruka hums a confirmation in answer, moving to Kakashi’s side and sweeping his body with an assessing glance, a healer’s gaze for his newly-conscious patient. “I’m an academy sensei, actually.” he says lightly, “Please call me Iruka.”</p><p>“Kakashi.” Kakashi responds automatically, even though they’re both aware that Iruka knows exactly who-- and what-- is laid up in his bed. He doesn’t really know what else to say-- or rather, a hundred questions bubble up in his chest, and he discards each of them in turn, too tired to deal with their implications or consequences. He will learn why Iruka healed him soon enough, what Iruka wants from him.</p><p>What Iruka wants does not appear to be information. He looks closely at the side of Kakashi’s face, and reaches out automatically as if to touch, before hesitating abruptly, as if he’s just suddenly remembered that his patient is, in fact, conscious now. “May I touch you to see how the wound is progressing?” he asks, as if Kakashi’s a normal patient, as if Kakashi has a choice in the matter. The incredulousness this inspires must register on Kakashi’s face, because Iruka clarifies: “You can choose not to consent to this. I’m not a medic technically, but I still do operate by those ethics when I’m healing.” His voice is very slightly acerbic, and kakashi finds that vaguely charming, because that sharpness is directed more at the implied other medics than at him.</p><p>And it’s nice that he actually does wait to touch Kakashi, not moving towards him again until Kakashi closes the aching eye and gives him an abbreviated nod. The probing touch is soft as it gently traces the inflammation around his eye, fingertips imbued with the barest hint of Chakra, just enough to get an impression of the state of the injury. Iruka seems pleased with the results, retracting quickly; Kakashi is surprised to find himself wishing the man had lingered longer, used more of the Chakra that Kakashi has come to recognize as an ally through the fever.</p><p>Iruka asks no more of him, and Kakashi finds that far more frustrating than if he were being peppered by questions-- by what logic does the Hokage’s adopted son, the one temperamentally suited to ascending to his surrogate father’s seat and arguably being groomed for the position, who almost certainly <em> knows what Kakashi is, </em> allow a creature like him to convalesce in his bed, <em> and </em>when they’ve never said two words to each other before? How does a man like that get away with regarding Kakashi like a person at all, like someone who has medical rights (legally arguable at best). Konoha is hidebound in its hierarchy, and Kakashi has no idea how Iruka expects to command the respect of all those old noble Shinobi families, if he bucks tradition so flagrantly.</p><p>(Grudgingly, some part of him respects that ability, is jealous of how little it seems to phase the other man, how normally he conducts himself, as if one can just <em> put down </em> years of that kind of training, walk away from it like it has no weight.)</p><p>“You know I’m Root?” Kakashi says, flatly-- it’s not the question he should be asking, not the most important one and certainly not the wisest, but it’s the thing that bothers him the most, and he’s <em> tired </em> in so many ways, far too tired to exercise his ordinary caution.</p><p>Iruka answers the question with a look nearly as flat, eloquent in its silence-- of course he knows, what does Kakashi take him for. But his actual words are a question, even more acerbic than before, and this time their edge is pointed toward Kakashi: “Are you?”</p><p>Kakashi knows the answer-- they both know this answer-- but he doesn’t say anything, and Iruka leaves to allow him more rest.</p><p>No, Kakashi is not Root, not anymore. He’d been in a tenuous position with the organization already, which had likely motivated his selection for the dubious honor of receiving the eye. His years of loyal service had earned him some pro-forma medical attention, but when the direction of the wound’s trajectory became obvious, they’d abandoned him as dead. The implication is clear: he is not useful to them, he is no longer one of them, and-- since he has survived against the odds-- he is now their enemy and they will act accordingly.</p><p>The only thing he feels about this is resigned.</p><p>(Later, in another such check-in, Kakashi asks Iruka why someone who is so obviously skilled with healing has decided to be an academy sensei for pre-genin, of all things. Iruka’s answer is simple: “Because that’s what I want to do.” but while it’s said flippantly, the words also carry a weight to them, like that’s where Iruka is best placed, like the teaching of children is a better way for Iruka to do <em> Service </em> than to be a medic on the battlefield, and Kakashi has <em> absolutely no idea </em> what to do with that. )</p><p>--</p><p>Kakashi stays with Iruka for a week thereafter, which is barely long enough for him to stand, but he finds existence in such a comfortable home unbearable-- he feels like an interloper, and though Iruka assures him that he is welcome there, he is still hyperaware of his own disjunctive presence.</p><p>He pins the source this discomfort partially on Iruka himself, who treats him like an ordinary person-- not only in the carework involved in tending to a wound, as would be expected in any healer charged with a patient’s care, but in the way Iruka speaks to him, asks him questions, does not shy away from any of his ordinary movements, or otherwise treat him like he’s about to shift into a wolf and destroy everything in the bedroom without warning.</p><p>“There’s going to be a kid from one of the beast clans in my class this year. An Uchiha.” Iruka says conversationally, and Kakashi-- who can never find a foothold in this or any of Iruka’s other statements-- decides merely to wonder at the academy schedule, if the kid is ‘gonna be’ there and isn’t already. “Can I ask for some advice? I want to make him feel comfortable.”</p><p>Kakashi blinks at Iruka; the Uchihua are lions, he recalls, and if this were anyone else asking, he’d expect the question to be something along the lines of ‘am I gonna need to provide this kid a box to shit in, like a cat’. But Iruka has proved himself a better man than most, so Kakashi nods and waits patiently for Iruka to struggle his way through the words, stringing them together with an unusual lack of grace.</p><p>“How- Is. Do you--” then Iruka stops, frowns, looks frustrated with himself. “I’m sorry,” he tells Kakashi. “And you don’t have to answer this, if it’s invasive or rude, but can I ask how close you are to the animals you shift into? Like, spiritually?”</p><p>Kakashi blinks again, and then half-closes his eyes, casting his mind away. He remembers the feel of the shift, and then the vibrance of the wolf’s senses, sharper than his own. Soft earth under his feet, the sensation of running alone through the dense forests that surround Konoha, hunting. He remembers the things Sakumo told him, their history and those frayed snatches of tradition and thought that he sometimes calls a culture, the myths they tell themselves about who and what they are, about dominance and submission and naturalness what it means to be an animal part of the time. He thinks about how much less trouble it is, in that body, to think like a human than it is to talk like one, to force the two larynxes in his throat to form the sounds of human speech-- a task for which neither were designed-- and the way the grating, jagged double-voice makes people flinch away from him. He thinks about the way that makes him look, to people who have never bothered to ask what it is to experience any of this.</p><p>He decides to tell the truth.</p><p>“We aren’t.” he says, opening his eyes again. Iruka looks confused, tilting his head. “We’re nothing like the animals we resemble.” He clarifies. “We-- the beast clans-- were created from ordinary Shinobi stock, and we were designed based on human perceptions of what our animals were like-- not on the actual animals.” Because that’s true, and when they forget it, they become caricatures of caricature, because the actual animals on which they are based have far more complex lives than the shinobi designing a better kind of warrior a century ago ever cared to investigate. ‘Dominance’ and ‘natural’ and ‘simple’ are human ideas; neither wolves nor lions have all that much use for them. “Treat him like a person. That’s what he is. Just a person with some notable differences in his life to yours.”  Iruka, he figures, has a better chance at managing that much then most of the humans he’s met, because Iruka-- flaunting respectability yet again-- has adopted the Jinchuuriki whose occupant once destroyed the village as his son, thus making the vessel<em> the Hokage’s grandson </em> and entering him into the implied line of succession.</p><p>Iruka accepts this answer, receives it with a nod, despite how novel and surprising that history obviously is to him. He switches the topic to Naruto instead-- a favorite, which is cute, because though Kakashi knows nothing about nor particularly cares for children, it both warms and discomforts him to see the obvious love and affection this man has for his charge. It feels voyeuristic, the affection very obviously something Iruka can’t help project. Naruto, apparently, will also be in Iruka’s class, and <em> thank gods </em> for that, because Iruka’s interventions have not been able to mitigate the nasty tendencies of the other teachers, and there have been effects on Naruto’s education as a result-- Kakashi listens, commenting relatively little, soothed to have a chance to bask in something he is unlikely to experience at any other time, even if that makes him feel like an interloper.</p><p>Kakashi only meets Naruto once, and he’s not entirely sure if that’s because Iruka has told the kid to let their guest convalesce in peace, or if the kid is avoiding Kakashi for his own reasons, as uncomfortable in his presence as he is in Naruto’s. When they actually meet, it is because Naruto-- no doubt attempting to be sneaky, and dear gods is that child going to need a lot of help to be half-decent in the stealthier aspects of a shinobi’s work-- very gingerly opens the squeaky door to Iruka’s bedroom and pokes his head inside, eyes wide and curious.</p><p>“Yo.” Kakashi greets him, droll and sarcastic, and Naruto blushes bright to have been caught. There is a long moment where they stare at each other, mutually uncomfortable in the awareness that they are so different and yet that they share some very fundamental experiences. (Naruto may not turn into a grisly half-wolf on a regular basis, but he contains a being that once destroyed the city and took so many lives, and so he is also regarded as monstrous; they both know what it is, to be looked at by children and know that <em> they </em> are the object of the nightmare stories used to keep said children inside at night, bogeymen made flesh.) It’s a hard thing to see in another person, especially in a face so otherwise young, and the moment seems to stretch much longer than the second or two during which it actually occurs. And then it’s gone, Naruto casting off that heaviness as easily as his father casts off the weight of other people’s social expectations, his face breaking into a bright smile that fills the room.</p><p>Which, that’s how Naruto is: he fills the room with his presence, boisterous and energetic and just on the edge of <em> too much, </em>overwhelming. He stays until Iruka chases him off, peppering Kakashi with all manner of questions, and Kakashi, despite himself, enjoys a game he makes of giving Naruto exactly the monosyllabic answers that will frustrate him the most.</p><p>Kakashi finds he likes it here, in Iruka’s warm house, his comfortable bedroom. He likes it too much; this kind of thing was not meant for him, it’s a complication, and the life of a wardog is a simple one. It <em> has to be </em> a simple one. No room for complications. Thus, he leaves when he can stand, which frustrates Iruka even if the other man makes no move to stop him (presumably still serious about consent.)</p><p>(Kakashi feels ridiculously grateful, <em> likes </em> the attention that comes with someone else taking care of him-- it would be too easy to get used to it, and that is neither his place nor his role. Add to that the signification of a bedroom, of a personal territory-- that being one of the few tendencies that most of the beast clans share, something like a fragment of nascent culture, that the bedroom and other areas of extremely personal territory are only shared with direct family and mates, particularly when used for tasks more quotidian than sex-- and thus that to welcome someone into these spaces is a form of courtship. </p><p>That’s <em> not </em> what this is, obviously-- Kakashi is convalescing, and even this particular imaginative slippage is aware of that-- it’s just that it’s so easy to imagine what it would be like if partnership <em> was </em> the dynamic here, and even that much scares him. So he leaves, because he doesn’t want to know what he’s missing, even briefly, even when it remains limited to his imagination.)</p><p>--</p><p>But- and though he <em> does </em> try-- Kakashi does not lose contact with Iruka. The other man comes around to his apartment to check on him, careful and asking permission but nevertheless firm and insistent, because-- as he explains, in that slightly strained note that tells Kakashi that Iruka wants to go off, and not necessarily in Kakashi’s direction-- Iruka has a medical obligation that he needs to discharge, even if he didn’t like Kakashi as a person. Which, by the way, he does. </p><p>(Kakashi doesn’t know what to do with that last part, so he does nothing, just lets Iruka into his apartment and silences the part of himself that says ‘yes, this is my territory, and I like it when you’re here, please feel free to linger’.)</p><p>This habit turns out to be serendipitous, because T&amp;I also knows that Kakashi is [was] part of Root, that this is where he got the fancy new eye that almost killed him, and they aren’t nearly so credulous and trusting as Iruka apparently is. (Kakashi does approve of T&amp;I’s wariness, is comforted by the fact that there are still those not in Root who take the prospect of threats very seriously, even if the results of that seriousness turn out <em> very poorly </em> for him personally.) </p><p>They deposit him, metaphorically in pieces, back at his apartment; he has the distinct impression that they’d’ve preferred him literally in pieces, too. But Iruka finds him there, is incandescent with anger, and patiently puts him back together, eloquent in his objection to blunt interrogation techniques that undo weeks of delicate healing work, and people who don’t trust the thoroughness of his own research.</p><p>Evidently, whatever T&amp;I finds is not enough to damn him, because Kakashi is welcomed back into the fold of ANBU and put on a mission rota, as if he hadn’t been working for years to undermine the city to which he had both personally sworn and was blood-bound to, with an oath of fealty.</p><p>(To be drawn back into ANBU is surreal, and that much more because it’s surprisingly easy to shift the current incarnation of his litany, of what <em> simple </em> means, back onto this version of Service, to embrace this despite the fervency with which he’d once sworn himself against it. This version of Konoha he serves is a more merciful one, but perhaps there is some room in the world for mercy.)</p><p>(Iruka keeps coming around, even once the healing is completed and the duty of healer to patient has been thoroughly discharged. Kakashi is confused by this, but welcomes it, and only belatedly startles when he realizes that this is Iruka making overtures of friendship, of maintaining what intimacy they had previously begun to establish, and perhaps deepening it. That someone would offer this, and so thoughtlessly, frightens him-- he <em> has </em>friends, but they’re relatively few and far between-- Kakashi nevertheless accepts the friendship, as drawn to Iruka’s presence now as he’d been drawn to the healing Chakra through the heat of fever.)</p><p>--</p><p>Sex, for kakashi, does not usually have any specific emotional salience: it’s a physical activity, something he can do with his body to relax. He is reserved in its pursuit, but more because he is reserved with anything that makes him vulnerable: it is something he only does with a handful of people, because there are relatively few people that he both trusts and that would be interested in casual sex.</p><p>And mostly “a few people” actually translates to “Anko”. She is fearless, which is something about her that he’s always admired: she joined Root after him, when freshly returned to the city, and she didn’t stay in the organization long, casting away its tethers as if the thought of their retribution were meaningless to her. Kakashi had assumed she’d be dead a week later, but that’d been years ago, and now she is here, inside of him, the arm on which she is not bracing herself tight around his chest, her teeth sharp and deep within the meat of his shoulder, keeping him pinned in place beneath her.</p><p>They are more similar now than ever before, and Kakashi isn’t sure how he feels about the comparison. She is also a member of a beast clan, but the only one of her line now, and she had always been strange for having more affinity for snakes than to the panther on which her line had ostensibly been based. Orochimaru had drawn her away, had done things to her that fundamentally changed her body, and not necessarily in all the ways she’d been wanting: she can still shift, the panther does still ride her, but it is no longer a panther entirely: it is longer now, with slit eyes and slit nostrils and a snake’s tongue, half her body covered in scales instead of in fur.</p><p>She has been altered, permanently, and she accepts it, has accepted it for most of the time Kakashi has known her, even though these modifications had been done to her with only the illusion of choice (as Kakashi, with his eye). She knows what she is, she knows what ways that differentiates her from the expectations others have of her, and she pursues her own authenticity regardless.</p><p>He’s asked her about it once, and she just shrugged and said that she knew no other way to be, said authenticity not really pushing her in the direction of careful self-reflection and analysis. Anko just <em> does, </em> and Kakashi wishes he knew how to just <em> do, </em>too.</p><p>But they are otherwise compatible in many ways, including sexually, particularly because Anko is a person with whom he feels safe submitting to in small ways. Sometimes the form of that submission is her reclining languidly on his couch while he patiently explores her body with his tongue, paying as much attention to innocuous scars and the soft skin of her belly as he does to her breasts or her cock-- that’s the attention she tends to prefer, and the thing he likes to give. Other times-- to vent her own frustrations and to give him something else that he needs-- she is on top of him, as now, holding him still while he keeps himself steady, his head down as he focuses on being open and <em> receiving </em> the waves of her limitless fury as expressed in the snap of her hips. It hurts, but it hurts <em> the right way </em>, and he likes it.</p><p>It hurts like battlefield exhilaration hurts, like the feeling of going up against someone who is a challenge, an equal, of fighting as the beast without holding anything back, the person opposite you meeting each blow with their own, feeling their claws and flesh tear into you was harshly as yours do to theirs, of <em> not knowing </em>who will win, who will survive the encounter. (Those fights are rare, for Kakashi, and rarer still now that he knows how to actually use his stolen eye.)</p><p>And with Anko, of course, with the sex, it’s very clear that they’ll both survive, that they’ll both be better for it. Once again, he is bigger than his body, he is limitless, and that much more for being able to receive Anko’s fury and to consume it, to bring it into his body and let it live there as pleasure.</p><p>(Many things about Kakashi have changed, and though he is sometimes unrecognizable to himself, this is still an alchemy he can still do, and he revels in it, allowing himself rare moments of ecstatic pride in his own abilities.)</p><p>(He wonders what sex with Iruka would be like-- how Iruka would want to feel good, and how that might manifest in himself.)</p><p>--</p><p>He and Anko never have sex in the bedrooms of their apartments-- they both come from beast clans and they thus both know the relevance of territorial intimacy; Iruka does not, but when Kakashi makes overtures and Iruka (to Kakashi’s delight) accepts with enthusiasm (and so quickly that Iruka blushes when he internalizes his own reactio, seconds later), the bedroom is where Kakashi leads them. The arrangement is-- explicitly, deliberately, (ostensibly)-- casual, but though Kakashi is the one to take charge in their encounters, and the sex leans rough and fast and wonderful, the lie is nevertheless betrayed by how otherwise careful they are with one another, and how fascinated they are to discover each other’s reactions and preferences.</p><p>And the lie is betrayed by other things, too, by the way that the same fascination and care manifests in the platonic analogues of those bedroom discoveries, and the way Iruka takes care of him, offers to do with Kakashi things that strike him as likely boring and banal to be around. Iruka does not demand to be entertained; Iruka is content to spend time around Kakashi’s apartment when Kakashi does tasks that otherwise direct his attention elsewhere, Iruka’s happy to shift his attention towards grading student papers when direct attention becomes too much for Kakashi to bear and he starts telegraphing various small gestural cues without realizing it, Iruka enjoys doing things like cooking and will do so for Kakashi in Kakashi’s own apartment, since Kakashi likes the food but is “too stubborn to come to my house and let me do this for you there”.</p><p>(Kakashi is not naive, and he can read the offers Iruka is making as clearly as Iruka read had his about the sex. It’s just that he can only go so far, can’t take Iruka up on them, not the way he wants to-- there is the litany, there is Iruka’s position, there is what Kakashi is, there are so many reasons. There are always so many reasons.)</p><p>(It’s about Duty, he tells himself-- that’s the first lie, the partial one-- it’s <em> simpler </em> this way, without the inevitable complication that would be produced by accepting Iruka as a lover-- that’s the second lie, and that one is total.)</p><p>--</p><p>Kakashi does more work than merely battlefield missions, now, and it’s frustrating and tedious and consuming. They are ostensibly in peacetime, and so many of their enemies-- including Root, whose risk he did not properly understand until he was removed from it-- now operate through subtle means, requiring similarly subtle modes of address. Kakashi has <em> learned </em>patience, but that doesn’t mean he wears it easily: he still rankles, still wishes for the easier solutions of battlefield fame, of problems he can solve by literally crushing them between his teeth. (Here, the caricature of an animal: that such a solution was ever as simple as it seems when battlegone, when one can’t see what ripples it makes to remove a life from the world.) Still, frustrated, he does the work, and proves as capable of a hound’s cunning as he is of the wardog’s brutality.</p><p>But this, too, renders him uncomfortably strange in his own eyes, nearly unrecognizable, and through a series of small and imperceptible shifts that he never feels but as an aggregate, on the rare occasion where he catches a glimpse of their accumulated mass as if rendered visible on his body.</p><p>One such instance occurs on a mission, and it’s not so much that the mission goes poorly, because it doesn’t-- it is strait-forward, the kind of battles for which he is sometimes nostalgic, spectacular in their unremarkability. The only notable thing about the mission is that he takes up arms against someone who is physically his superior-- another beast, who he must fight actively, who occupies his attention, who delivers him blow after devastating blow and tears his body open and requires Kakashi to be clever, to surprise--  just the way he likes it, just the way that makes him feel exhilarated and alive.</p><p>Except that Kakashi <em> doesn’t. </em> He doesn’t feel exhilarated and alive. He <em> doesn’t </em> feel pride whenever he successfully evades a blow, or furious frustration when he doesn’t. He feels no sense of unyielding pride, when he wins, when his enemy makes a mistake and Kakashi lunges and latches his teeth around the other’s throat, tearing it away. For so long, the thing he lived for, the thing he was bred for, the <em> only </em> thing that came automatically to him was The Fight. It was simple, when nothing else was-- the only thing that had to be simple, that he had to worry about and know, the sole object of his focus.</p><p>
  <em> Was. </em>
</p><p>Now, though, he is only tired and uncomfortable, he is thinking too much of everything else-- of Root, of getting those few of his friends still there <em> out </em> of that organization, of how much he wants to be home ( <em> and he has a place he thinks of as home) </em>, of what the unintended consequences of this battle will be, of how few beasts there are left and how he’s about to kill another one, of how senseless and stupid all of this is. And it’s not even that the thoughts are distracting, that they make him less effective as a fighter-- if that were the case, he could use them as an excuse to brutally remake himself, because his usefulness as a wardog was one justification for keeping himself under such vicious restrictions. No, he fights fine, as he always has done, and it’s only the joy and exhilaration that are gone; he feels hollow in the violence, and that emptiness is all that remains after the victory; he is a well that has finally run dry.</p><p>He has no idea who he even fucking is without that feral, violent battlelust.</p><p>Kakashi does not emerge from the battle without physical injury-- deep injury, the kind it actually does take him quite a bit of time to heal-- nor does he immediately return to his human shape, not for the rest of their mission, because it feels too alien to wear the skin that allows him to sort-of pass (on the rare occasions that people don’t already know who and what he is) while he doesn’t even feel like he can pass to himself.</p><p>(Those close to Kakashi, such few of them there are, have always had misgiving-- about his life, his outlook, the way he is used and the way he allows himself to be used. He figures that’s their right, that they just don’t and won’t understand. </p><p>He never expected to be the one with misgivings of his own.)</p><p>(He feels small and scared and angry, and on impulse-- because it feels comfortable and familiar (the way battle should and does no longer)-- he wants to default to anger, to an inferno-like rage. He wants to find the <em> cause </em> of this, and destroy it completely, so that he can go back to being what he had been before-- because he knew that wasn’t healthy, he knew that to be wardog was to consume poison willingly, and that eventually it would kill him, but he also knew that it was something he <em> could </em> do, and the knowledge of his inevitable trajectory was familiar and comfortable in a fatalistic kind of way. </p><p>Now he is uncertain of anything (of everything), and “simple” feels dangerously unattainable, and he wants to find a point of origin-- if not an accurate one, then one he can use as a scapegoat. <em> Iruka </em> , he thinks, and begins to feel a spike of rage-- but, no, no, even he cannot lie to himself about this. Iruka was not the cause of this, and some of the way he feels now is that shadow of the small scared child he has never managed entirely to kill. Iruka is a <em> catalyst </em>, not a cause, and Kakashi will not allow himself to become so monstrous as to vent his pain on his loved ones solely for their proximity.)</p><p>--</p><p>Kakashi goes home and collapses into an exhausted sleep on the floor of his apartment, and that’s where Iruka finds him, still dirty and streaked with blood from wounds unattended and now scabbed over. (Kakashi usually checks in upon returning from a mission-- a little weakness he allows himself as an indulgence, and it’s never really occurred to him that this might be something Iruka looks forward to as well, that Kakashi’s failure to do so might be cause for concern.)</p><p>Kakashi’s body will address the wounds on its own-- has already started doing so-- and they both know it, but Iruka, perhaps anxious and reaching for something with which to ground himself, too, nevertheless tends to Kakashi’s injuries anyway. Kakashi, once again unconscious and adrift in a feverish morass, once again leans towards it, follows the warmth, relishes the easy slide of Iruka’s charka into his body, how warm and good and <em> right </em>it feels, even as it traces the painful winding path of wounds left by someone else’s claws. He follows it back to wakefulness, finds Iruka hovering, feels guilt and confusion and shame, remembers how awful the mission was and wishes he were unconscious again.</p><p>He tries to send Iruka away-- not because Iruka is unwelcome, and not because he doesn’t want the comfort of Iruka’s presence, because <em> he does </em> -- it’s just that he literally does not know how to be vulnerable, how to share these parts of himself, and he’d rather not inflict himself on someone he loves this much, when he is-- to his reckoning-- incapable of actually being helped. But Iruka is stubborn, and also upset-- is <em> near crying, </em> and this is yet another thing with which Kakashi has <em> no idea </em> what to do. “I’ll go if you really want me to,” he says to Kakashi, his fingers digging sharply into Kakashi’s shoulder and betraying how much Iruka <em> does not want to do that, </em> how afraid he is that Kakashi will demand it anyway, “But--” and he strays off uncomfortably, obviously fighting his vocabulary for the right way to express an idea that he knows will make Kakashi uncomfortable. “Please let me take care of you, Kakashi.” he says finally, stricken, “ <em> Please.” </em></p><p>Kakashi <em> does not </em> know <em> how </em> to do that, but he doesn’t want to hurt Iruka more, so he accepts.</p><p>And so Iruka does, and it feels <em> good </em>, but for that part of Kakashi that says he should neither want nor enjoy this, that this isn’t what he was designed for.</p><p>Iruka’s hands are gentle, and though Kakashi does shy away from the contact on impulse, he loves the feel of those hands on his skin, as they stroke him and clean his injuries and wipe the blood and dirt away. There is so much in those touches, so much between them that is unspoken and unsaid, and Iruka’s hands on his body carry so much <em> want, </em> want that echoes Kakashi’s own. So Kakashi reacts to it, trying to draw Iruka closer (which Iruka allows), trying to deepen this thing into romantic contact (which Iruka similarly allows), trying to take charge as their exchange of physical gestures begins to pick up heat (this, Iruka <em> does not </em> allow.)</p><p>Kakashi reads lascivious romance novels in public, this is well-known-- it’s popularly assumed to be a front, an affective misdirection to put people at ease and to make them think he’s not paying as much attention to them as the fearsome Konoha Battlehound obviously is. And that’s absolutely true-- it is all of those things. But the best lies are the ones that are grounded in truth, and Kakashi also reads those novels because he likes them, because they’re fun and they bring him pleasure(, and because part of him likes to sometimes imagine that the world they describe might, in some ways, be true.)</p><p>But those stories aren’t true, and they’re not meant to be. They were never meant to be. Their tropes, though alluring, are a convenience, a series of shorthands for the ugly work of painful human interaction, a way of eliding and making beautiful that which might otherwise be too hard to bear for its inglorious awkwardness and inelegance.</p><p>Iruka is firm and gentle, in a way Kakashi loves and doesn’t often admit that he loves. Iruka is shorter than him, but nonetheless boxes him in, covering his body, protective and safe and soothing. Iruka is kissing him, his chin and his neck, is gently grazing his nipples with teeth, is kissing the soft scar-crossed skin of his shoulders and his chest. Iruka is careful, running his tongue across the clitoral hood that keeps Kakashi’s erection relatively constrained, sucking said erection into his mouth and seeking Kakashi’s entrance with his fingers, smiling at the way Kakashi bucks against him, whining with impatience. Iruka is inexorable, and takes his time, stretching out his fingers, adding another, stroking upwards and pressing just a little further inside. Iruka has his own erection that’s poking Kakashi in the shin, but he’s not letting Kakashi touch it, nor is he doing anything about it himself, not until he has once already pushed Kakashi over the edge and rendered him a shaking, unintelligible mess-- only then does he give Kakashi what Kakashi has been begging for with increasing desperation. He pushes inside, and Kakashi cants his hips upwards, pulls at Iruka’s hips with his hands, trying to get Iruka inside <em> faster </em>, trying to convey the depth of the everything that he’ feeling through the unification of their bodies: all the want, a match for Iruka’s want that he can still feel in every place their bodies are touching, and all the fear that holds him back.</p><p>But with this, too, Iruka takes his time; Kakashi, fresh from an orgasm, is slightly oversensitized, and Iruka is aware to that fact, pressing himself all the way inside, laying heavily on Kakashi’s body and gently kissing his shoulder, soothing Kakashi with soft words as Kakashi reacts to only the feel of Iruka’s cock inside of him. He’s hyper-aware of the pressure, his walls wrapped snuggly around Iruka, and each post-orgasm twitch or slight shift of their bodies is another jolt of pleasure shooting down his jagged nerves. It is exquisite, and he wraps himself bodily around Iruka in an echo of what his cunt is doing, letting himself get lost in sensation. Iruka, when he begins to move, does so more by grinding forward than by taking the deep thrusts typical of their fucking; slowly, deliberately, he brings them both up to orgasm again, as if he is as desperate to maintain as much physical contact as he can, like Kakashi is.</p><p>And it’s <em> good </em> sex, good in a way that they’re both <em> eager </em> to experience again, in the way that leaves them sweaty and messy and disgusting and wrapped up in each other’s limbs. Gross or not, they stay that way, Kakashi still holding tight to Iruka’s body, now feeling slightly possessive as Iruka buries his head in the soft skin between Kakashi’s neck and collarbone.</p><p>And that’s the thing, there’s still desperation and want in the touches, there’s still that edge of hunger and pain and fear. This is afterglow, and it, too, feels good, but the satiation they feel is <em> only </em> physical.</p><p>Therein lies the problem-- that so much of what occurs between them is only physical. Healing sex is a trope Kakashi knows well from the novels, wherein such an encounter would be followed by a deep comfortable rest, with kisses and intimate touches that soothed the soul as the sex had soothed their bodies. But that world isn’t real, and there is no touch in this one that Kakashi can offer Iruka to wordlessly resolve the way he holds himself back out of fear. The sex was good, <em> is </em>good, but it’s not a substitute for intimacy and access, and so that strain of wanting remains raw and uncomfortable between them, painful in its clarity, and everything else that Kakashi tries to offer feels too much like hollow apology.</p><p>--</p><p>This is not tenable. This has not been tenable for a long time, and Kakashi knows that-- has been able to feel himself hurtling towards a break for ages, and none of his old mechanisms for preventing the inevitable collision with himself seem to be working. There will come a time when he shatters spectacularly, and that time will be soon, and he is surprised at how badly he wants to avoid it, given how fatalistically inevitable it feels.</p><p>Hiruzen calls Kakashi into his office, looks at Kakashi with the serious and inscrutable expression that he so often wears, like he’s measuring the weight of Kakashi’s soul against a feather. “I have decided,” he says, through puffs of his cigarette, “to remove you from ANBU.”</p><p>Kakashi expects that this is the brunt of the bad news, and it does come as a blow, but less of one than he was anticipating. He nods shortly, his soul dropping to the pit of his belly. “May I ask in what way my service has been unsatisfactory?” Kakashi responds, and it’s not the thing he wants to say, but it <em> is </em> what he’ll allow himself.</p><p>“Your service hasn’t been unsatisfactory,” Hiruzen tells him, “But I have a more important assignment for you.”</p><p>Kakashi doesn’t expect that, and his head snaps up, gaze sharp, mouth opening for question. Hiruzen shakes his head, commanding him to be silent with that small gesture. “I’m assigning you a genin team.” He speaks louder, over Kakashi’s dismayed noise of protest. “It will consist of Uchiha Sasuke, Uzumaki Sarutobi Naruto, and Haruno Sakura.”</p><p>Every word the Hokage has spoken tightens around Kakashi’s throat and chest like ropes shearing through his lungs; he finds it difficult to draw enough breath, and he is shaking, and more with every word the Hokage speaks. Because all of this is bad-- very very bad. He is a <em> wardog </em> , he is monsterous, he is not supposed to be trusted around <em> anyone </em> but those assigned to be his handlers and his mission teams, he is <em> certainly not </em> supposed to be in charge of the training of a group of <em> children. </em>Children who he knows. Children who Iruka teaches, who Iruka adores, about whom Iruka rambles in the evenings when Kakashi gets lost in the sound of his voice. He can’t be put in charge of them. He can’t be exposed to them. He can’t be responsible for their safety.</p><p>And oh but <em> fuck </em> he certainly can’t <em> shape </em> them. He’s been selected, Hiruzen tells him, because he has shown exceptional loyalty since leaving Root, and exceptional ability in the field. He is clever and adaptable and fierce and strong. He exemplifies the will of fire. Hiruzen wants him to teach those things to these students. To guide them. To manipulate them. To turn them into something like what he is.</p><p>He tries to turn it down, to twist away from the duty. He tries to flatly refuse it, and to present arguments as to why it’s a terrible idea to give <em> a wardog a fucking genin team, </em>but there is no line of argumentation that will turn Hiruzen from this course, and the old man dismisses him before he can get much farther, sending him away.</p><p>Kakashi flees to the trees, tries to lose himself by letting the wolf ride him, tries to give himself fervently to every myth he’s ever believed about what it means to do what he does and be what he is. Normally, he finds solace there, but now-- now all he can think about is the fact that this, <em> this, </em>is what they’re asking him to impose onto a bunch of children.</p><p>It was different when he was the child, when he was the only one who bore the weight of this. It was different when he could believe that “simple” was possible, that the litany was real, and that the world was exactly as it appeared to be-- or else that he could pretend it was, out of an obedience that he misunderstood as the mark of loyalty. But now they’re asking him to turn a group of children, of <em> Iruka’s </em> children, <em> Iruka’s beloved son </em> , into something like himself, and that is something he <em> cannot do </em>.</p><p>This, he realizes, is something like the point of no return that Sakumo once faced, a moment of brutal clarity after which the image that his father’d maintained of himself had become abruptly unsustainable. Kakashi is catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror for the first time: he can see both the extent of his damage and all the things it has wrought, all the pain and senseless death and the way those things have only yielded still more generations of pain and senseless death, every way the imperative towards simplicity and unquestioning obedience has hurt the things he’s been working to serve. He sees his own complicity in that system, and the ways he has wounded himself to keep himself in this position, the shape he has forced himself into because he told himself there was no other course to peace and safety and justice.</p><p>He cannot teach a child to make themselves into something like this, he cannot continue this cycle for yet another turn.</p><p>And <em> if </em> he cannot do that, then what, exactly, is he? What is he for? What the fuck is he to do now?</p><p>There is no absolution in running as the wolf, because the wolf-- as he’d once told Iruka-- is an invention, a caricature based on a false idealization that the shinobi behind its design had arbitrarily decided was reality. The myth is that the wolf doesn’t think, but of course the wolf thinks, and of course the wolf always has. It has never been simple for Kakashi, because it has never been simple at all, and there is no painful transformation that he can undertake that will ever make it so.</p><p>And so eventually he stops, and for a long time he is still, lost to time, while his overactive brain tries to process this loop and runs aground again and again, desperate for answers but incapable of generating a solution internally.</p><p>He can only come to the same place, across every formulation, run aground on the same shoal: that he cannot do this, that he cannot form Iruka’s beloved son into the same kind of broken machine that he is, not even for Konoha.</p><p>And that he has no answer for what to do instead. Only that he can’t do it alone.</p><p>But-- he may not have to.</p><p>It is dark when he finally comes back to himself, when he once more can feel his own presence inside his body, can feel the sensations it is experiencing. He has been standing here for a long time. He is shaking, bone-cold despite the hot stickiness of a humid summer night. He is hurting, and though that pain is psychological, he can feel it in his limbs.</p><p>He can’t do this alone.</p><p>So he takes himself to Iruka’s house, hesitant and forcing himself forward anyways, and he doesn’t wait to speak when Iruka opens the door, shocked to see him (Kakashi has resisted Iruka’s offer to come back here <em> so strenuously, </em> and for <em> so long) </em>and worried at Kakashi’s obvious distress. “Hiruzen gave me a Genin team. With Naruto.” Kakashi says the words as if they aren’t separated, with barely a space for breath between them, wild-eyed and panicked.</p><p> </p><p>Iruka is quickly assessing this situation, taking stock of Kakashi’s fear, measuring what he sees against Kakashi’s historic reluctance to be this open and vulnerable, to share the things that scare him, to step into Iruka’s territory literally and at all. Iruka’s response is careful, probing like there’s an injury here that he can’t see and he needs to take stock of the damage. “I know,” he says, a little uncertain, “I signed off on that decision. I trust you. I trust you with him.”</p><p>Kakashi keens, retracts into himself almost violently, dislodges part of his mask as he runs his hands through disheveled hair and pulls on fistfuls of the gray strands. How could Iruka- foolish, why would anyone want him to---</p><p>Kakashi discards the potential for specific thoughts, because he doesn’t want to send himself back into the spirals in which he has already lost so much momentum, and he will not have the nerve to attempt this a second time. “Iruka,” he grits out, painfully, like he’s pulling the words out of his mouth with a chain. “I don’t- I can’t-” he steadies himself with deep breaths, clinging hard to the only words that brought him here. “I can’t- I don’t know how to do this alone. I can’t-- I can’t make the kids into what I am. Not Naruto. I don’t- I can’t-”</p><p>And the words will carry him no further, his energy to express them suddenly gone, leaving him feeling physically weak and shaky.</p><p>But Iruka nods to him, brow furrowing slightly in understanding-- because he does understand some part of it, knows this distress is coming from that parts of Kakashi that Kakashi has been so reluctant to share; Iruka’s been pretty sure that he can fucking handle that part of Kakashi for as long as he’s been making overtures about deepening their relationship, if Kakashi would only <em> let him try. </em></p><p>He steps back out of the doorway, and holds the door open. “Please come in” he says, and he means ‘please let me take care of you’, and his tone is soft, slightly pleading, extending an offer of everything that Iruka’s home has come to symbolically represents to Kakashi, everything that Kakashi’s been been silently worshipping for years and has been too terrified to accept.</p><p>And Kakashi still hesitates-- will still hesitate for a long fucking time--  but this time he <em> does </em> accept.</p><p><br/>
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  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Trans characters:<br/>
Kakashi is a transman<br/>
Anko is transfeminine</p><p>I do refer use the word "cunt" at all, and use it once in reference to Kakashi's anatomy, also describing Kakashi's lower genitalia in a way that makes it clear he's not cis. I also once refer to Anko's cock.</p><p>It may look like I'm bashing the healing sex trope-- that's actually one of my favorite guilty pleasure tags. It just doesn't work for this story. &lt;3 </p><p>There MAY, at some point in the future, be some set of stories that use some of these ideas, but I do not anticipate continuing this 'verse at this time.</p><p>I am not, and will not be, on either Twitter or Tumblr. You can find me at <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/00101010">pillowfort.</a></p><p>Thank you for reading,</p><p>- 42 / booleanWildcard / 00101010 / Asterisk / *</p><p>

-- also, this does not remotely fit the tone of the story, but I definitely do think of this as "the one where i wrote two sex scenes and still the most satisfying that kakashi enters is a door"</p></blockquote></div></div>
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